Room at the Top
by CarmineDuvale
Summary: Sometimes, death is the end. Sometimes, it's an unfurnished flat, an enemy and a whole lot of grey areas. After Life AU


Before anything, there had been imprisonment.

 _(He remembered it, the pages curled around his inexistent form like roots, ink suffusing his lungs like_ _bluish-blackish mold, sipping in his veins, cavorting with his cells, infesting his brain._

 _He remembered it - the pain._

 _It used to be a predominant state and he - he was just a concept.)_

The searing stab that followed was nothing. It punctured close to his heart and snapped a hole in between his ribs, and there, in that gaping nothing of a figurative cage, a sort of liberty nestled.

He fell.

 _(He fell through the viscosity of time and age, fell trough something that was magic and science, fell through points in space and seas of indescribable nonsense and air rushed through the open spot in his almost solid nothingness and there gathered dust._

 _His heart resonated like an old clock against it and he suspected, not for the first time, that there were needles and spinning wheels hidden in its chambers._

 _He was not human.)_

He could have fallen for years.

 _(He fell long enough for freedom to make a home there, in the emptiness in him, cozy and clattered, with solid wood floors and river-stone fireplaces, with walls of books and regal armchairs, a home so unlike anything he was he felt the need to see it crumble and reconstruct it after his imagery._

 _He was a god.)_

He was a paradox.

 _(He was still a concept with a shade of existence tied around his shoulders.)_

When he hit the ground, he knew that was not the world that he had left.

Immediately (or perhaps years later) a girl fell near him, a mass of electric curls glued to a sunken face from which two eyes like pools of whiskey burned at him in incandescent rage.

Her mind was a waterfall of words on written pages, knitted yarn and toothpaste.

 _(She was, he thought, as close to interesting as a small wisp of a thing could ever aspire to come.)_

…

To die was like swallowing bullets.

 _(To die was not how it was supposed to end._

 _She was a girl with a plan and girls with a plan were uncanny little creatures._

 _Girls with a plan came in shapes and sizes, in styles and fashions, came with dark lipsticks and cherry chapsticks, with rows of buttons and plunging necklines, with acne and large breasts and eyes set too far apart for any semblance of human prettiness._

 _They came with cheekbones._

 _They came with souls._

 _Girls with a plan marched ahead, following the beat of their drum, and marched and marched and marched until they combusted. They didn't stop. They supernova-ed._

 _Girls with Hermione's kind of plan wanted to take over the world and could. They grew claws and fangs and went to war, the beasts, the dragons, the walking dead of fairytales you hear. They lived and lived and lived and lived._

 _Hermione didn't.)_

Nothing did go blank. Nothing ceased existing.

She just fell, and fell, and fell, and when there didn't seem to exist anything more to fall into or towards, she crushed.

 _(The boy's eyes were the green of murky water plants, deep enough to drown in them as slow as sinking into quicksand._

 _He dripped into her brain like water._

 _He burned into her heart, like a stab.)_

He smirked at her, a charmingly cruel of a thing, and something within her seemed to short-circuit and shut down.

…

They were both dead, of course. But what was death, when it came down to it?

…

To share an afterlife with Tom Riddle was incomprehensible. The fact he found charming she'd helped in bringing him down was even more baffling.

"It really isn't," he offered.

She hated this place. Hated how there was no barrier between her mind and his, how their very thoughts reverberated, dripping in the quiet space between them, never letting them forget the other. She ignored him the best she could. Alas, he did not offer her the same amount of courtesy.

"The way to losing is paved with courtesy," he supplied cheerfully.

She wasn't sure if this was Heaven or Hell. She wasn't sure it was even plausible to believe in either.

"Belief is a waste of time at this point," Tom agreed unhelpfully, "but then again, we are quite definitely somewhere, aren't we?"

Hermione was sure she was dead. What she didn't understand was what death had to do with being stuck in a flat with an evil half a soul that carried around a huge amount of obnoxious persistence.

"Why, Hermione," the evil half a soul crooned. "Flattery will get you everywhere."

…

Her first instinct was turning to research.

"No books," Tom muttered.

Her second was to kill him.

"No weapon."

She could always strangle him, she supposed.

"Not enough body mass."

She could at least spell his mouth shut.

"No magic," Riddle sighed.

"Yes," Hermione muttered. "That is the real tragedy here."

…

If there was an outside to go to, they couldn't get there.

The windows, magical as it turned out, looked upon sunny fields and clear lakes. They were also tightly shut, skillfully spelled and devastatingly resistant. Hermione pulled, and pushed, and hit them with every heavy thing she could get her hands on, and she got nowhere.

Doors, for their part, were nowhere in sight. Riddle, unfortunately, was everywhere.

"Would it kill you to help?" she demanded.

From where he was sprawled on the floor, the half a Dark Lord looked at her with amused curiosity.

"Dying while you're dead would make for an interesting paradox," he said. "Where do you think you'd go, though?"

Hermione groaned. Bastard. Arrogant, smug, clearly misssorted bastard.

…

The thing was, the lack of magic set her on edge, too. She supposed it was better this way. Had they had magic, one of them would have tried to maim the other already. She was certain it would have been her too, because he wouldn't stop wandering around looking cataclysmically amused about the entire situation.

Meanwhile, she couldn't even think about him as Voldemort anymore.

Voldemort wasn't supposed to draw complex equations in the dust that kept gathering everywhere and then spend an unholy short amount of time solving them.

Voldemort wasn't supposed to whistle jazz tunes while turning into food the ingredients that came out of nowhere.

Voldemort wasn't supposed to look interested in her.

He became Riddle and then Tom and then she had to keep reminding herself that this was the guy who'd killed Harry's parents and half the people she'd ever heard about.

"Technically," – Tom was pretty big on technicalities – "that wasn't me."

"An evolved version of you is still you, Tom."

He slapped a hand over his heart and a wounded expression on his face.

"You don't believe in change, Hermione? Don't you believe in choice? In nurture versus nature? Are we to be slaves of destiny, forever chained, never quite free?"

"Am I to be stuck with your drama-heavy self for eternity, never quite free, too?" she demanded. "You still killed Myrtle. You still used Ginny."

"Pawns." Sometimes, it was easy to remember who he truly was and that wasn't the guy who allowed her monopole over the bedroom. _(He was that, too, a layer that she tried to peel away from him and couldn't.)_ "Pawns are meant to be used."

"They were people!"

"And they served their purpose," he said. "You know about serving purposes, don't you?"

She thought about Neville. Crabbe and Goyle. Rita Skeeter.

Tom smirked nastily. "Yes. You know all about removing pawns, too."

"I did not-"

"You did not murder them, you mean to say? It was War. I'm sure you eventually killed others." When she didn't answer, he shrugged gracefully. _(He had a way of shrugging with his entire body that just made him appealing. Trustworthy. Honest.)_ "People are only as indispensable as one's temperament can endure," Tom said.

"It wasn't like that. It was for the better," she whispered.

He regarded her with something akin to pity.

"That only means you like Grindelwald's fanaticism better than mine, sweetheart."

…

Sometimes, he didn't do equations. Sometimes, he wrote poetry, the old-fashioned kind she imagined he would've learned in school. Sometimes, he drew, though he did not have much aptitude for it. Mostly, they talked.

She didn't have a choice, she told herself.

There was no way out.

There were no books.

Just she and he and a silence that pressed heavier by the second.

…

When she felt him getting too close, she accused. It was fortunate somehow, how many issues there were between them.

"You hated people like me. You hated muggles."

Tom looked thoughtful. "I disliked some of them, yes. My father who abandoned me. The people at the orphanage. I also hated some wizards, you know. Weaklings like my mother, fool who gave over to death just for being scorned by the lesser."

"You organized an entire terrorist organization just to get rid of us, Tom. That's a bit of a strong reaction to disliking someone."

The corner of Tom's mouth lifted slightly.

"Are you naïve enough to think that's how terrorist organisations work?"

Hermione glared.

"Fanaticism is fanaticism, Tom."

"Fanaticism is for those at the bottom, love. Up at the top, it's only about power."

…

He had a way of reading her and, much as she tried to tell herself nothing was a secret in this place, he still interpreted everything until her every feeling was a sharpened tool used against herself.

"Just admit it," he needled. "You hated them, too. Dumbledore and that ginger family you keep thinking about and those clones of Abraxas that I can only assume are his descendents. You even hated your teachers."

She steered into the pot viciously and refused to look at him.

"Don't be stupid. Of course I didn't."

"Come on, Hermione." He pressed the front of his body to her back, his arms snaking around her waist like chains. "Just come out and say it. You hated being used by them. Being their prized monkey. Being the sad little clown that both amused and disgusted them. Just come out and say it. It's okay."

"Just because I might have disliked some of –"

"Don't be preachy," he murmured in her ear and she inhaled sharply at the feel of his hot breath. "It doesn't suit the veritable storm of emotions you're feeling. You hated them." He pressed a gentle kiss to her cheek. "You had a plan, didn't you, Hermione? I just know you did. You were going to kill me and then you were going to show them. Through any means, you were going to show them."

Hermione shut her eyes tightly.

"They were never going to use you again. You were going to earn acceptance. You were going to earn respect. You were going to make them fear you _just because you could_."

She wanted to shake her head but she didn't.

"Little girl," he said amused, "you're just like me, after all. You just choose the better-positioned side, didn't you?"

"What would you know about the better-positioned side, Tom?" She detangled herself from him and stepped away. "You lost twice if you remember."

"I did", he said. "So did you, love. But you know what's outside these walls, don't you?"

Hermione inhaled deeply. "A world, I presume."

"Ripe for the picking," he agreed. "Are you ready to make a mark yet?"

 _(Up at the top, it's only about power.)_

She thought about Dumbledore's eyes, appraising her usefulness and dismissing her.

"I am," she said.

A door appeared on the wall and the lock clicked open. Tom offered his hand. Wary to the bones, Hermione took it and squeezed.

* * *

 _ **This was my submission for the Rare Pair Secret Santa on Tumblr. Due to circumstances, I ended up writing this an hour before the original deadline and sent it uncorrected, which I apologise for. I tweaked it a little bit now and corrected (most?) of the grammar-related mistakes so I hope you enjoy this weird brain-child of mine.**_


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